


(run, run, run away) buy yourself another day

by Yevynaea



Category: Doctor Who, Leverage
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Lords & Ladies, Chameleon Arch, Crossover, Gallifrey, Gen, Memories, One Shot, Pocket Watches, Running Away, Short One Shot, Team as Family, Time War, a little bit, really just concept/idea exploration bc of another fic that inspired me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-22 22:23:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7456143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yevynaea/pseuds/Yevynaea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In five different places, in five different years, on a little planet known to some as Earth, stolen-and-forgotten spaceships sit in disguise, and five newly-human children (who were not children until recently) step out into the light of Earth’s single sun, broken-not-broken pocketwatches clasped tightly in tiny hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(run, run, run away) buy yourself another day

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Horology Job](https://archiveofourown.org/works/251142) by [havocthecat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/pseuds/havocthecat). 



Not all who live on Gallifrey are willing to fight, to die, when the War begins. Some still do, because it is their only option, or because they think it is. Some run. (And here is a secret-that-isn’t-so-secret: a TARDIS is a pitifully easy thing to steal, so long as there’s something wrong with it.)

Those who run, they scatter, to every so-called corner of an infinite universe, to different places in time, and it’s really only coincidence (or perhaps you’d call it fate) that a few stolen time machines land in largely the same place. The machines themselves are quite quickly misplaced, as their pilots aren’t sure whether they will be hunted down, and so are swift to create themselves anew.

In five different places, in five different years, on a little planet known to some as Earth, stolen-and-forgotten spaceships sit in disguise, and five newly-human children (who were not children until recently) step out into the light of Earth’s single sun, broken-not-broken pocketwatches clasped tightly in tiny hands.

* * * * *

“Parker, give them back,” Nate requests, not looking up, from the paperwork he’s reading, just holding out a hand for the wallet and watch she’s taken off him. (He’s only recently started carrying the watch again, its weight a comfort when his head is full of indistinct nightmares.)

“They’re the same,” Parker says, practically an accusation, and Nate looks up, noting vaguely that his wallet is nowhere in sight, and instead Parker holds...another pocketwatch. She’s holding his watch up to one that, as she said, looks nearly identical, only perhaps a lighter shade of gold. “The writing is different, but they’re the same.”

“Writing?” Nate raises his eyebrows. Parker looks up.

“The circles,” She says, half an explanation, and half a self-correction. “Look.”

Nate does as ordered, taking the watches when she offers both, comparing the etchings under the light.

“Where’d you get this?” He asks, handing her own watch back to her.

“They found me with it. Is yours broken, too?” She asks.

Nate stares at his watch for a long moment.

“I don’t know.” He says finally, because he’s just realized that he’s never opened it.

“Me neither,” Parker frowns, glaring at her pocketwatch as if it’s a particularly difficult lock. Nate can barely hear her past the whispers in his head.

The watches, created and closed so many years apart from each other, click open in nearly the same second.

* * * * *

Eliot’s watch is gold, and Alec’s is platinum, and Sophie’s is dark silver, and it takes a while, the explanations, the convincing. In time, five watches are opened, five lives are remembered, five new-old names are shared, and ten hearts beat out an erratic sort of song.

It could be considered funny, how little changes, once the pocketwatches are nothing more than pocketwatches, sitting broken and empty in a box together now they are not needed. Nate, Sophie, Eliot, Hardison, Parker, they keep their human names and their human lives and they go on as always. They have nothing of their old home but each other, and they have built their new home around themselves, anyway, so between them there is little to be missed of the world they left behind.

* * * * *

(Five watches are opened, and halfway across an infinite universe, a stolen-and-unforgotten TARDIS sings of shared blood and shared memories, only just recovered. Her lone pilot plots a course, grinning all the while.)


End file.
